How mystery heroes saved woman from burning house

Sept. 17, 2012

Updated Aug. 21, 2013 1:17 p.m.

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In the entry way of his Tustin home, Chuck Rees describes the sequence of events that led to him being credited for saving an elderly woman's life during a Buena Park house fire. Rees said when he entered the burning house he called out. A frail voice replied "Hello." Rees, who had already grabbed a dog, said he had to convince the woman inside to leave the house with him. She wasn't convinced until he showed her the fire. Rees said he reentered to check for anyone else before the smoke got too bad to continue. BRUCE CHAMBERS, THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

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In the entry way of his Tustin home, Chuck Rees describes the sequence of events that led to him being credited for saving an elderly woman's life during a Buena Park house fire. Rees said when he entered the burning house he called out. A frail voice replied "Hello." Rees, who had already grabbed a dog, said he had to convince the woman inside to leave the house with him. She wasn't convinced until he showed her the fire. Rees said he reentered to check for anyone else before the smoke got too bad to continue. BRUCE CHAMBERS, THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

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In the entry way of his Tustin home, Chuck Rees describes the sequence of events that led to him being credited for saving an elderly woman's life during a Buena Park house fire. Rees said when he entered the burning house he called out. A frail voice replied "Hello." Rees, who had already grabbed a dog, said he had to convince the woman inside to leave the house with him. She wasn't convinced until he showed her the fire. Rees said he reentered to check for anyone else before the smoke got too bad to continue. BRUCE CHAMBERS, THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

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Smoke emanates from a house fire in Buena Park as firefighters gain the upper hand Sunday. KEVIN WARN, FOR THE REGISTER

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Chuck Rees describes the sequence of events that led to him being credited for saving an elderly woman's life during a Buena Park house fire. BRUCE CHAMBERS, THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

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Chuck Rees describes the sequence of events that led to him being credited for saving an elderly woman's life during a Buena Park house fire. BRUCE CHAMBERS, THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

In the entry way of his Tustin home, Chuck Rees describes the sequence of events that led to him being credited for saving an elderly woman's life during a Buena Park house fire. Rees said when he entered the burning house he called out. A frail voice replied "Hello." Rees, who had already grabbed a dog, said he had to convince the woman inside to leave the house with him. She wasn't convinced until he showed her the fire. Rees said he reentered to check for anyone else before the smoke got too bad to continue. BRUCE CHAMBERS, THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

Chuck Rees pounded on the door as dark smoke curled into the sky.

"Is anybody in there?"

He yanked at the handle, but the door was latched shut. He couldn't get it open. He couldn't get inside. He stepped back and saw flames snapping from the back of the house and exploding through a backyard bush.

He banged again on the door.

"Is anybody there?"

A voice, faint: "Hello?"

•••

Rees, 50, brushes away news stories that hailed him and another man as good Samaritans for what happened next at that burning Buena Park house. He likes to help, he explains. He says he once chased down a purse thief and has pulled over for car crashes. When wildfire threatened his east Tustin neighborhood, he grabbed a hose.

His day job, though, is behind the cash register at Costco.

It was chance that led him to the hillside neighborhood in Buena Park where fire gutted a two-story home on Sunday afternoon; chance, and lunch with his mother-in-law. They were on a lazy Sunday drive after eating when Rees saw a line of black smoke not far away. He turned toward it.

At about the same time, Aman Malik, a 60-year-old real-estate investor, noticed that same black smoke snaking from the house next door to his. He, too, rushed toward it, shouting to his young daughters to get inside: "There's fire!"

Malik met Rees on the house's front lawn. Their recollections of the few minutes that followed agree on most – but not all – of the details:

Malik tried the front door, but it was locked. Rees ran to a gate on the side of the house, also locked. Behind it, though, Rees could see a dog trying to get out, some kind of Labrador mix with a graying muzzle. The presence of the dog made him think there might be someone inside the house, too.

He remembers hearing the pop of fire already devouring the back of the house, a sound that reminded him of a roaring fireplace.

He ran to the other side of the house, where he found a chain gate that he was able to push open just enough to get through. A Labrador mix met him on the other side, but he couldn't tell if it was the same dog he had seen earlier.

He was looking for a hose; instead, he saw another door, a heavy metal security screen fastened with a rope latch. He was able to yank it open a few inches before the rope caught, just enough for a dog to get in and out. He banged on the door. "Is anybody in there?"

The voice was small – the voice of an older woman who sounded disoriented, as if she had just been startled awake. "Hello?"

"I need to get in," he told her. "Your house is on fire."

She lifted the latch and opened the door. Rees could smell smoke inside the house. He could hear the fire crackling now in the kitchen – as if someone was crinkling cellophane paper – and the crashes of things falling.

He remembers leading the woman through her burning house to the front door, where other neighbors helped her into a chair on the front lawn. He also brought along the dog by the scruff of its neck.

Malik had also been trying to find a way into the house. The way he remembers it, the woman was still inside the house, standing in her room, when Rees pushed open the front door. "You need help?" Malik asked and, when the woman answered yes, he offered her an arm and held her up as she walked out.

Rees says he went back into the house after the woman was safe to check for anyone else. Smoke was curling across the ceiling; he passed a staircase and saw that the second level of the house was black with it.

He noticed a picture propped on a dining room chair. It was a colored print, old, and it showed a young man and woman, maybe on their wedding day. But it was in another room, closer to the kitchen that was already glowing with fire, and flames were starting to flicker across the walls toward him. He got out.

"I wish I would have saved it," he says now. "For her sake."

•••

The first firefighters were arriving. Smoke was billowing out of every room. Minutes later, the house "flashed over," fire exploding through every room. The woman – in her 80s, with dementia, according to fire officials – watched from the safety of a chair on her front lawn, surrounded by neighbors.

"The only thing I'd like to say is, thank you to the people who helped my mother and my family," said the woman's daughter, who declined to give her name. "My mom is doing as well as she can."

The fire gutted the home, leaving it so dangerous that investigators were not able to get in until Monday to start piecing together how the fire started. As of Monday evening they had not determined an official cause.

Malik said he worried, even as he tried to get inside, that the house might collapse at any moment. He did it, he said, because of his Muslim faith: "Muslims are supposed to help our neighbors."

Rees drove away shortly after he got out of the house, before neighbors could even get his name. "I was afraid there might be someone else in the house; I didn't want to see if there was that other dog," he said. "I just couldn't bear it."

Neighbors, who identified Rees as the man who helped rescue the woman after seeing a photo of him, said she lived alone in the house, and her dog was found a few blocks away. Fire officials say the woman would not have survived if she had not been helped from her home.

"I'm not here to take any kind of credit," Rees said. "I just happened to be at the right place."

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